Los Angeles

WHAT IS AN AFRICAN AMERICAN? While many plays purport to examine race issues, few tackle them head on. Ensemble Studio Theatre’s production of The Many Mistresses of Martin Luther King, by debut playwright Andrew Dolan, certainly does. It may not say anything new about race in America, but it does discuss race issues in a…

COMIC EPHEMERA In Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s 1636 comedy L’Illusion Comique, the modern playwright has abandoned the contextual trappings that make the original at all interesting, in order to write for a contemporary audience.   The result, in Casey Stangl’s fleet staging, very slightly disguises shallow earnestness as light amusement.   It’s fun; it’s supposed…

BLACK AND WHITE AND GOOD ALL OVER A smart play is usually a provocative play, but a provocative play is rarely smart.   Many playwrights competent to stir controversy have neither the chops nor, sadly, the intention to say much of benefit except to their own notoriety; and really talented writers don’t always invest in the…

THE GODOT WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR Samuel Beckett is a great comic playwright. You don’t believe me? Then run, don’t walk, to the Mark Taper Forum and see the blissfully funny and yet profoundly melancholy revival of Waiting For Godot. You will finally see what so many productions fail to get: that Estragon and Vladimir…

SOMEHOW, IT KEEPS ON WORKING For those who have never seen the 1978 musical Working, the Production Company’s current revival may be somewhat of a revelation. The subtitle of Studs Terkel’s brilliant oral history of the same name – adapted for the stage by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso – is People Talk About What…

IMPRISONED BY ART Most literary intellectuals have as much business writing about life behind bars as incarcerated felons have teaching text analysis.   In the last few months, Los Angeles has hosted two plays written by playwrights who have spent time, and set stories, in prisons.   Miguel Pinero did his time as a thief and drug…

OH WHAT A TANGLED WEB WE WEAVE While Theatre Unleashed’s cast and crew have a gloriously and unashamedly good time bringing The Spidey Project to the West Coast, it’s a shame that their source material isn’t the parody it promised to be in the press release. There are some very funny moments in this silly,…

GROUNDLINGS ZERO The best part about cleaning up my DVR last weekend was catching up on Raising Hope, the hilarious FOX comedy. It’s funny, surprising, naughty, sometimes dirty, and wholly original. In one episode they give Cloris Leachman a beautifully timed joke about how she could only have an orgasm with her late husband when…

AMERICAN NIGHT SUCKS, BUT IT SWALLOWS Juan José, a Mexican cop sick of being on-the-take, has crossed the border in search of citizenship, leaving his pregnant wife behind. Panicking over flash cards while studying for his U.S. citizenship exam, Juan falls asleep and the rest of this 90 minute, intermissionless, astoundingly uneven cavalcade of skits,…

HATE THE MUSICAL, BUT LOVE, LOVE, LOVE THE PRODUCTION Whether you love or hate the musical version of The Color Purple, no one, and I mean no one, can or will deny that this is one of the finest productions ever staged in a small theater in Los Angeles. Director Michael Matthews has taken a…

TWO MORE ONE-PERSON PLAYS AT THE SKYLIGHT Burke Byrnes’s  The Yellow House (Fridays) and Harry Hart-Browne’s  Special Delivery (Saturdays) both possess the virtues and weaknesses of one-person shows. Both have the bracing intelligence of their creators. Both are very well performed. Both are highly personal and yet avoid the narcissism that personal works are often guilty of….

WHY DO WE HAVE WHY WE HAVE A BODY? Every few years a vanity project comes along so appalling that one’s jaw hangs open for its entire running time, saliva connecting the lower lip to the floor in a single unbroken strand.   The planets have to align very particularly for a travesty of this magnitude…

A GROUNDED SEAGULL In Chekhov’s The Seagull, the young, angst-ridden writer Tréplev maintains that “What we need are new forms! We need new forms, and if we can’t have them, then we’re better off with no theater at all.” Yet when Chekhov wrote this line in 1895, he was referring not to the interpretation of…

A NEGLECTED CLASSIC GONE AWRY The story of Antony and Cleopatra shares with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet those two indispensable elements of tragedy: love and death. While Romeo and Juliet is perhaps Shakespeare’s best known play, Antony and Cleopatra is all but neglected. This is all the more surprising considering contemporary interest in its principal…

THRILLING HOPELESSNESS Go up into Gilead, and take balm, O virgin, the daughter of Egypt: in vain shalt thou use many medicines; for thou shalt not be cured. – Jeremiah 42:11. In 1964, Lanford Wilson wrote a play startling in its representation of a gritty present, and even more surprising now for its continued relevance.  …

ACTS OF CONSCIENCE All theater is inherently political, in that a story is only as objective as its teller.   But some plays go straight to the 24 hour news cycle definition of politics, addressing problems of international diplomacy divisive enough that only a stage may politely host them.   Sarah’s War, Valerie Dillman’s play enjoying its…

RISE ABOVE THEATRE MOVEMENT HANDLES THE TRUTH Just three years after Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men (1989) was produced on Broadway, the play’s popularity was eclipsed by the film version with Tom Cruise. Revivals of the play are rare, but based on the vivid production by Rise Above Theatre Movement (RATMO), the courtroom drama…

FANGS FOR THE MAMMARIES Carson Kreitzer’s 2003 play Slither conforms to a certain category of American text: the women’s empowerment monologue extravaganza.   Hallmarks of the genre include plotless, drama-free speeches of subjugation, delivered by female figures unfettered by character; a monologue format occasionally and inexplicably interrupted by thematically related scenes also lacking dramatic tension; and…

ORIGINAL SIN In their fevered exploration of the seven deadly sins, Figure 8 playwright/co-director Phinneas Kiyomura and co-director Jerry Kernion seem hell bent on making sin seem as original as possible. Visually, their approach results in moments of genuine power. Emotionally, it has its limits. Kiyomura rather enigmatically calls Figure 8 a collection of eight…